Metal Subgenres: The Complete Family Tree

Reading time: 10 minutes

Every list of metal subgenres faces the same problem: where does a genre end and a description begin? The musicologist Robert Walser devoted a chapter of Running with the Devil (1993) to exactly this, arguing that metal's genre boundaries are constructed by musicians, fans and media rather than found in nature. So any count is a method, not a fact. Ours: a subgenre earns a spot when it is a distinct named tradition with a sustained scene and dedicated bands, not a one-off hybrid or a label that fits a single act. By that method there are roughly 45, and every one of them is defined below, in one or two sentences each, sorted into the eight families they actually descend from.

The Counting Method

Numbers thrown around online range from "20 or so" (typical listicle) to 91 (Spotify's data division, analysing listening patterns in 2015) to well over 100 (fan-maintained wikis, which count every micro-fusion with a name). None of those is wrong; they use different sieves. The sociologist Deena Weinstein showed as far back as Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (1991) that metal is a system of musicians, audiences and mediators, and each of those groups draws the map differently: musicians split hairs, algorithms split listeners, and encyclopedias split the difference. This page's sieve, distinct named traditions with sustained scenes, lands on 45. If you count grunge out as a neighbour rather than a member (a defensible call, addressed below), make it 44 and we will not argue.

The Traditional Heavy Metal Family

The founding branch: 1970s Britain and everything that refined it without breaking it.

Traditional Heavy Metal

The root style: blues-derived riffs, verse-chorus songcraft and clean, powerful vocals, established across the 1970s by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and their peers. Start with Sabbath's Paranoid.

NWOBHM

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal, named in the UK weekly Sounds in May 1979, injected punk's speed and DIY energy into traditional metal. Iron Maiden's 1980 debut is the flagship record.

Speed Metal

The literal-minded bridge between NWOBHM and thrash: traditional melody and vocals kept intact, tempos pushed toward the red line. Early Helloween's first recordings live here before power metal claimed the band.

Power Metal

Soaring clean vocals, double-kick gallop and fantasy-scale lyrics; the European template was set by Helloween's Keeper of the Seven Keys: Part I (1987). Blind Guardian and DragonForce carry the torch.

Glam Metal

The 1980s arena strain: huge hooks, bigger hair, party-first lyrics, born on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip. Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil era is the reference point.

Neoclassical Metal

Guitar virtuosity built openly on classical technique: harmonic minor runs, arpeggio studies, concerto ambition. Walser's scholarship treats this borrowing of classical prestige as a defining metal move; Yngwie Malmsteen is its face.

The Thrash and Groove Family

The 1980s speed line and what happened when it slowed down on purpose.

Thrash Metal

NWOBHM riffcraft played at hardcore punk velocity, with palm-muted precision and shouted vocals; Metallica's Kill 'Em All (July 1983) announced it, and the Big Four (Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax) defined it.

Crossover Thrash

Hardcore punk and thrash fully merged: short songs, gang vocals, circle-pit tempos, more denim than leather. D.R.I. built it; Municipal Waste keeps it fun.

Technical and Progressive Thrash

Thrash rebuilt with dissonance, odd meters and conceptual ambition. Its landmark act is Voivod, formed in 1982 in Jonquière, Quebec, the anchor of our guide to Canada's metal lineage.

Groove Metal

Thrash slowed to a mid-tempo stomp built on syncopated, swinging riffs. Pantera is the reference point; Lamb of God carried the style into the 2000s.

The Extreme Metal Family

The styles the scholar Keith Kahn-Harris groups as extreme metal in his 2007 study of the same name: music organised around transgression of sonic and lyrical limits.

Death Metal

Guttural growled vocals, blast beats and down-tuned riffing at maximum density; Possessed's Seven Churches (1985) and Death's Scream Bloody Gore (1987) are its founding pair. Start with the latter.

Melodic Death Metal

Death metal's aggression carrying twin-guitar melody descended from Iron Maiden, centred on 1990s Gothenburg, Sweden. At the Gates' Slaughter of the Soul is the standard entry.

Technical Death Metal

Death metal at conservatory difficulty: labyrinthine riffs, virtuoso drumming, constant metric surprise. Quebec is a stronghold through Gorguts and Cryptopsy, from a province whose capital, The Canadian Encyclopedia notes, "has forged a reputation as a metal capital."

Black Metal

Shrieked vocals, tremolo-picked riffs, deliberately raw production and an atmosphere-first ethos; the genre wears the title of Venom's 1982 album Black Metal, and its second wave was defined in early-1990s Norway by Mayhem, Darkthrone and Emperor.

Atmospheric Black Metal

Black metal's textures stretched into long-form immersion, trading violence for scale, with nature and isolation as recurring subjects. Wolves in the Throne Room and Panopticon are modern anchors.

Blackgaze

Black metal blended with shoegaze's blurred, effects-washed guitar walls, so the shriek sits inside something almost beautiful. Alcest built the blueprint; Deafheaven took it to festival stages.

Grindcore

Hardcore punk and metal compressed into seconds-long detonations of blast beats and noise; Napalm Death's Scum (July 1987) is the formative release.

The Doom and Slow Family

The branch that took Black Sabbath's slowest moments and made slowness the whole point.

Doom Metal

Slow tempos, mournful melody and enormous riff weight in direct Sabbath lineage. Candlemass and Saint Vitus define the classic form.

Epic Doom

Doom fronted by operatic, dramatic clean vocals; the substyle takes its name from Candlemass's 1986 debut Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, which is also where to start.

Death-Doom

Doom's tempos joined to death metal's growls and heaviness, developed around England's Peaceville label by Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Anathema.

Funeral Doom

Death-doom slowed to a processional crawl, with riffs held so long they approach ambient music; the most patient listening in metal.

Stoner Metal

Doom's weight run through fuzz pedals, psychedelia and desert-rock groove. Kyuss, Sleep and Electric Wizard cover its spectrum from sun-baked to pitch-black.

Sludge Metal

Doom soured with hardcore's throat-shredded vocals and abrasion, strongly associated with New Orleans through Crowbar and Eyehategod.

Drone Metal

The riff dissolved into sustained tone: single chords held for minutes, felt as physical pressure. Earth sketched it; Sunn O))) made it a discipline.

The Gothic, Industrial and Symphonic Family

Metal crossed with the machine and the orchestra. This branch shares a border with the wider electronic dark scene, whose dancefloor side is mapped in our EBM and body-music guide.

Gothic Metal

Doom-rooted metal wearing goth rock's atmosphere, romance and male-female vocal contrast; the style's name is usually traced to Paradise Lost's 1991 album Gothic, and Type O Negative and Lacuna Coil widened its audience. Where it meets the parent subculture is covered in our goth subculture guide. A current-generation example: Daemon Grey, the artist behind this site.

Industrial Metal

Metal riffing locked to machine rhythm, samples and programmed percussion; Ministry's The Land of Rape and Honey (1988) and Godflesh's Streetcleaner (1989) mark its arrival, and the historian S. Alexander Reed credits Ministry with successfully fusing industrial music with heavy metal styles. The full story, band by band, is in our industrial metal genre guide. Current-generation example: this site's own Daemon Grey.

Neue Deutsche Härte

The German-language 1990s style locking down-tuned riffs to electronic programming and deadpan baritone vocals. Rammstein made it a global export.

Symphonic Metal

Full orchestral arrangement as a structural element rather than decoration, usually with classically trained vocals; Nightwish, founded in Kitee, Finland in 1996, set the template, with Epica its most orchestral heir.

The Alternative and Nu Metal Family

The 1990s branch that rebuilt metal from outside influences instead of inside ones.

Alternative Metal

Metal bent around non-metal structures, dynamics and vocal styles; Faith No More opened the door, and Tool and Deftones proved the approach had depth.

Nu Metal

Down-tuned seven-string riffs, hip-hop rhythm, turntables and traded melody-scream vocals, with guitar solos deliberately dropped; Korn's October 1994 debut ignited it. The movement's full roster lives in our full nu metal guide.

Funk Metal

Slap bass and funk syncopation under metal guitar; Living Colour and Primus made it virtuosic instead of novelty.

Rap Metal

Fully rapped vocals over metal riffing; Rage Against the Machine remains the style's political and technical high-water mark.

Grunge

The honest boundary case: Sabbath-weight riffs played with punk economy and indifference to metal's theatre, blown into the mainstream by Nirvana's Nevermind (September 1991). Whether grunge is metal is a genuine argument; we map its bands either way in our grunge guide.

The Core Family

Everything descended from the 1980s collision of hardcore punk and metal. In The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023), Eric Smialek calls these "abject genres": styles the parent scene loves to disown precisely because they got popular.

Metalcore

Metal riffcraft structured around hardcore's breakdowns and shouted conviction, grown from the late-1980s crossover scene into the 2000s' dominant heavy style. Wave by wave, scene by scene, it is mapped in our complete metalcore and hardcore guide.

Melodic Metalcore

Metalcore built on Gothenburg-style guitar leads and clean-sung choruses between the breakdowns; Killswitch Engage wrote the modern playbook.

Deathcore

Death metal's vocals and blast beats welded to metalcore's breakdowns, tuned for maximum physical impact; Whitechapel and Lorna Shore span its first and current waves.

Mathcore

Metalcore at deliberately hostile complexity: whiplash meter changes and jazz-adjacent dissonance. The Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge are the twin peaks.

Djent

A progressive-metal offshoot named for the onomatopoeic sound of a palm-muted, extended-range chord, grown out of Meshuggah's rhythmic language (the band formed in Umeå, Sweden in 1987) by a late-2000s online generation; Periphery turned the forum sound into a career.

Electronicore

Metalcore breakdowns spliced with EDM and trance drops, played completely straight even when the videos are jokes; Electric Callboy is the current standard-bearer.

The Progressive, Folk and Avant-Garde Family

The branch defined by what it adds: time signatures, tin whistles, or total rule-breaking.

Progressive Metal

Extended compositions, odd meters and conceptual ambition inherited from 1970s prog; Dream Theater formalised it and Opeth stretched it toward death metal and folk at once.

Post-Metal

Metal's weight applied to post-rock's slow-build, largely instrumental arcs; Neurosis invented the language and Isis codified it.

Avant-Garde Metal

Metal with its conventions deliberately dismantled: unconventional instrumentation, structures and vocals, from Voivod's descendants to Igorrr's baroque-breakcore collisions.

Folk Metal

Traditional folk instruments and dance melodies inside full metal arrangements; Eluveitie work the Celtic seam, Korpiklaani the Finnish one.

Viking and Pagan Metal

Norse history and pre-Christian themes carried on black and death metal frames, commonly credited to late-period Bathory; Amon Amarth is its best-known modern face.

Pirate Metal

Folk-power metal performed in full nautical character, flagship act Alestorm; proof of Kahn-Harris's observation that calibrated humour is load-bearing in metal culture, not a betrayal of it.

The Family Chart

Family	Defining trait	Start here
Traditional	Blues-rooted riffs, clean powerful vocals	Black Sabbath, Paranoid
Thrash and groove	Speed and precision, or its mid-tempo stomp	Metallica, Kill 'Em All
Extreme	Growls, shrieks, blast beats, transgression	Death, Scream Bloody Gore
Doom and slow	Slowness and weight as the point	Candlemass, Epicus Doomicus Metallicus
Gothic, industrial, symphonic	Atmosphere, machines, orchestras	Ministry, The Land of Rape and Honey
Alternative and nu	Outside influences rebuilt as metal	Korn, Korn
Core	Hardcore breakdowns and conviction	Killswitch Engage's catalogue
Progressive, folk, avant-garde	Added complexity, tradition, or chaos	Opeth's catalogue

The Starting-Point Picker

Match what you already love to the family most likely to stick:

• Classic rock radio raised you: traditional heavy metal, then NWOBHM, then power metal.
• You want speed and anger with craft: thrash first, melodic death metal second.
• Horror movies and extremity appeal: death metal, then black metal, then grindcore when ready.
• You prefer slow, sad and enormous: doom, then death-doom, then stoner metal for daylight hours.
• Electronic music or dark atmosphere is your home: industrial metal, gothic metal, Neue Deutsche Härte.
• The 1990s are your decade: alternative metal, nu metal, grunge.
• Breakdowns hit you physically: metalcore, then deathcore, then mathcore for the brave.
• You listen for musicianship: progressive metal, djent, technical death metal.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many subgenres of metal are there?

Roughly 45, counting distinct named traditions with sustained scenes and dedicated bands rather than one-off hybrids; that is the count this page defines. Broader sieves run higher: Spotify's data division identified 91 metal micro-styles in 2015, and fan-built wikis list over 100. Every number depends on its counting method.

What are the main families of metal?

Eight: traditional heavy metal, thrash and groove, extreme metal (death, black, grind), doom and slow, gothic-industrial-symphonic, alternative and nu metal, the core family (metalcore and its descendants), and progressive-folk-avant-garde. Nearly every named subgenre descends from one of these branches, though bands cross between them constantly.

What is the difference between black metal and death metal?

Death metal is guttural growls, blast beats and down-tuned precision, founded by Possessed and Death in 1985-1987. Black metal is shrieked vocals, tremolo-picked riffs and deliberately raw, atmosphere-first production, defined in its second wave by early-1990s Norway. Death metal aims at density; black metal aims at mood.

Why does metal have so many subgenres?

Partly fifty years of global scenes splitting and recombining, and partly culture: the sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris found that granular subgenre knowledge works as status within metal scenes, so fans are genuinely motivated to draw fine distinctions. Naming a new style precisely is itself a way of participating in metal.

What is the heaviest metal subgenre?

It depends what heavy means to you. If heaviness is speed and aggression, grindcore and deathcore are the extreme. If it is weight and pressure, funeral doom and drone metal hold songs to a crawl until sound becomes physical. There is no single answer, only competing definitions of heavy.

Sources

• Keith Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge (Berg, 2007).
• Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (Lexington Books, 1991).
• Eric Smialek, “Contempt-of-Core”, in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music, ed. Jan-Peter Herbst (Cambridge University Press, 2023). DOI
• Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Wesleyan University Press, 1993).
• Alan Cross, “How Many Genres of Metal Are There? Spotify Thinks It Has the Answer”, A Journal of Musical Things (2015).
• “Fight Fire with Fire: Scream Bloody Gore vs. Seven Churches”, Decibel (2021).

This reference is maintained by the team behind Daemon Grey, a Canadian industrial goth metal artist signed to Berlin’s Out Of Line Music.